New Features in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3

25Aug

Stage3D Accelerated Graphics Rendering (desktop) — Stage3D (“Molehill”) is a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering developed by Adobe. Stage3D provides a set of low-level APIs that enable advanced 2D/3D rendering capabilities across screens and devices (desktop, mobile, and TV). It gives 2D and 3D app and framework developers access to high performance GPU hardware acceleration,enabling the creation of new classes of rich, interactive experiences. Note: Stage3D for mobile will be enabled in a future release.

Flash Access Content Protection Support for Mobile — Flash Access content protection support is now available on mobile devices.

Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Support — Allows ActionScript developers to take advantage of high performance native parsing and generation of JSON-formatted data. Developers can integrate existing data seamlessly into their projects.

G.711 Audio Compression for Telephony — Support interoperability with legacy phone systems via the Flash Media Gateway (FMG) and other third-party clients (through the open RTMP protocol) without the need for transcoding.

Socket Progress Events — Improve management of data transfer using the Socket class by providing a new property to determine the number of bytes remaining in the write buffer and a new event for when data is being sent to the network layer. The new APIs allow applications can easily track progress and provide responsive feedback.

Native Text Input UI (mobile) —Mobile apps can now take advantage of the native text input controls on mobile platforms, including platform-specific user interaction behaviors such as magnification and text selection. Native text controls are available on Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and iOS operating systems.

JPEG-XR support — Flash Player and AIR now include support for the JPEG-XR advanced image compression standard (International Standard ISO/IEC 29199-2). The computationally lightweight JPEG-XR format provides more efficient compression than JPEG, enables both lossy and lossless compression support, and adds support for alpha channel transparency.

Enhanced high resolution bitmap support — BitmapData objects are no longer limited to a maximum resolution of 16 megapixels (16,777,215 pixels), and maximum bitmap width/height is no longer limited to 8,191 pixels, enabling the development of apps that utilize very large bitmaps.

High efficiency SWF compression support — Developers can now take advantage of LZMA compression for their SWF files. LZMA compression can reduce SWF size by up to 40%, enabling users to benefit from richer experiences with shorter download times and reduced bandwidth consumption.

DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying — DisplayObjectContainer now implements a removeChildren API allowing developers to quickly remove all of a container’s children using a single API call. A new MovieClip.isPlaying property returns the MovieClip’s current playing state.